Art & Creativity Quote by David McCullough

A working historian admitting he’s competing with the modern attention economy is a small act of humility that doubles as a craft manifesto. McCullough isn’t romanticizing “the reader” as a noble figure; he’s treating reading as a fragile, contested behavior. The line quietly shifts responsibility off the audience and onto the writer: if there are “good reasons” to stop, then the book has to earn every page.

The intent is partly practical, partly moral. Practical because narrative history lives or dies on momentum. McCullough’s best-known books don’t just present facts; they stage them, scene by scene, with an almost novelistic insistence that people once lived inside these choices. Moral because he’s defending the act of sustained attention without preaching about it. By calling the reasons “good,” he refuses the easy sneer at phones, streaming, work, exhaustion. He’s acknowledging that distraction isn’t a character flaw; it’s a condition of contemporary life.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to historians who write as if obligation is enough: you should finish this because it’s Important. McCullough’s version of importance is different. He implies that significance has to be felt, not assigned. Context matters here: he rose during a late-20th-century boom in popular history, then watched the 21st century tighten the squeeze on long-form reading. The quote reads like a late-career calibration: history can still matter, but only if it’s told with an awareness of what it’s up against.